The Still Point
by cousinb
Summary: A bit of H/R stuff. Ruth's anger at Harry seemed to me to be really interesting, but not really dealt with in a way that was satisfying. Post 8.3... beyond that it's all just a bit of indulgence on my part. Kudos & BBC are the proud owners of Spooks.
1. Chapter 1

The Still Point

Chapter 1

It smelled the same. That's all that kept going through Ruth's head, "It feels so different to be back in London, but it smells the same." At least she had that, because as she saw it, the only other thing that was a constant in her life was loss. A life of nearly 40 years and all she had to show for it was loss and the smell of a fall day in London as the rain began to fall. Shit. How had she allowed herself to get back to this place? How had she allowed that life she had carved out of a sheer wall of impenetrable loneliness to slip through her fingers? She guessed she wasn't surprised. All along, it had felt like it was on loan anyway. That was why she had never really been in love with George, with Nico. Loved them to distraction, yes, but "in love"…no. That part of her was firmly boxed up and stowed away in a safe place and if she had anything to say about it, would remain there. She had lost everything, but at the very least she could keep her heart, her sanity, her soul to herself. They couldn't ask for that too, could they? Harry couldn't ask for that. He must know it was too much. She got angry just thinking about Harry. Harry, sitting there, looking at her with those sad eyes. Harry cavalierly making decisions that always ended with loneliness, heartache, death. Harry thinking he understood but really understanding nothing. How dare he ask her to care? How dare he ask her to sacrifice yet again? Good, kind Ruth…we'll ask her and she'll give it all up in an instant. Well Ruth was furious and she was fighting back. How dare he make feeble gestures towards her to "fix" things and "sort things out"? How laughable. Even the Great Harry Pearce couldn't bring someone back from the dead completely intact. The gods were angry and they were laughing at Harry and she wanted nothing to do with it. Was he to blame for everything…well, yes, he was. She would have quit the service years ago if it wasn't for him. He made her believe that what they were doing was ethical, moral, valuable, a "service" if you will, and it was all a lie. It was all a goddamn lie. Being in the service was the equivalent to flushing your life down the toilet and he knew it. She wouldn't be here if it weren't for him. If he wasn't so goddamn good and caring and ruthless and clever and gentlemanly and…Harry. Damn him. And damn this shabby apartment with ugly furniture and ugly chipped teacups…couldn't they at least give me some decent teacups? With a roar, Ruth suddenly picked up her full cup of tepid tea and flung it at the wall. It hit with a splat and a crack and exploded into grey dingy fireworks. Wow, now that felt good. One more time. Hurl, splatt, crash! Again, again, again!!!! Now the plates, now the cheap tacky art, anything that would break and shatter into a million pieces, just like her life.

Chest heaving, tears rolling down her cheeks, Ruth suddenly stopped and in the stillness, she heard something: a knock at the door. If she sat quietly enough they'd go away. There was no one she wanted to see anyway. No one. Again, the knock sounded, this time louder, not so polite…"Ruth, what are you doing in there? Open the door!" Silence. Pounding. "Ruth, open the goddamn door!" Harry's growl echoed through the door and incensed her. Screaming, Ruth ran to the door, "You want me to open the door? I'll open the door you bastard! You goddamn bastard!" As the door opened, a surprised Harry stood immobile while Ruth, sobbing, launched herself at him with the full force of her pent up rage and pounded on his chest. "You've ruined it! You've ruined it all! I've thrown away my life because of you! All because of you! I was happy and then I saw you and everything I had was snatched away - everything! You bastard!" Ruth continued raining blows on Harry's chest and he stood his ground, a steel door that would never give way. Ruth sobbed, her punches becoming more and more feeble, until she slid to the ground. Harry stood awkwardly over her. He was honestly confused, but knew that he probably deserved it. Regardless, it was the least he could do for her: the least he could bear for Ruth. He had done nothing but bring heartache into her life. His Ruth, and she was the worse for it. Harry finally bent down, awkwardly patting her shoulder as her sobs subsided into hiccups.

Ruth's mind was blank. She was empty, completely drained and incapable of independent movement. Harry bent down, gently helped her up and led her obediently to the couch; sitting her down and placing a blanket overtop her. Ruth's eyes were blank and unseeing, but Harry knew she was in there somewhere. He just had to be patient. Ruth curled into a small ball underneath the blanket and Harry perched on the end of the couch, just out of reach of her feet.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The early morning sun streamed in through the window and illuminated the dust in the air, the pock-marked wall, the destruction from the night before. Ruth stirred stiffly underneath her blanket and for a second almost forgot. For a second she didn't feel her heart breaking, didn't feel her world crumbling. There was a familiar smell and a warmth that was comforting but at the same time completely alien. What was that weight on her legs, the pressure on her hip? As Ruth broke through completely to consciousness, she became aware of Harry slumped over her legs with his arm draped comfortably over her hip. He was asleep and breathing deeply, almost snoring. Ruth's sleep drugged brain scrambled to remember how he had gotten here and then suddenly it all came back. Her anger, her behavior…oh god…she had to extricate herself from this and quickly. Ruth slid her legs off the couch, unceremoniously dumping Harry from his comfortable resting place. His eyes flew open and both leapt back as if burned, retreating to opposite sides of the couch. Ruth looked at Harry warily, his rumpled coat still on, his tie loosened but still in place. He too moved stiffly and awkwardly and refused to meet Ruth's eye. "Erm…good morning Ruth. Yes, well, uh…sleep well?" Ruth sighed with frustration. "Harry, I've just destroyed my apartment and given you a good pounding and that's all you can say?" The corners of Harry's mouth twitched. "Are you laughing at me? Are you goddamn laughing at me?" Harry looked stunned for a moment. Ruth looked angry. "Ruth, I'm sorry. No, I wasn't laughing. Well, maybe I thought about it for a second because yes, what you said was a bit funny in an ironic sort of way and…" He trailed off, his look clearly beseeching her to save him from his stupid ramblings. Ruth eyed him impassively. She had absolutely no intention of saving Harry Pearce from anything, least of all from himself. She spoke softly, so softly it was nearly a whisper, "Clearly Harry, you don't understand. You don't understand that you are to blame for all of this. And despite your "kind" little gestures all you do is bring pain and agony and loss into my life. You are the reason I'm sad and alone. You. You are the reason that all the people I love are gone. George and Nico, Jo, Adam, Zaf, Colin, Danny, Zoey, Tom…all gone because of you. When I think about the respect I had for you, the way you made me fe…" Ruth trailed off, realizing what she was saying. Harry sat immobile except for a slight twitching in his jaw. He turned to look at her and she was stunned at the pain she saw etched across his features, at the lines that were carved into his familiar face and the fear that had dulled his eyes. When had he gotten so old, so scared? Harry quickly gathered up his face into the craggy stone monolith that it usually was and for a second, Ruth was relieved to look at him and recognize the Harry of old, the Harry that she had fallen in love with. She physically flinched. How could she still be in love with him? What the hell was wrong with her? Harry cleared his throat, "Ruth, you're exactly right. You always are. I am sorry that I intruded on your private life. I meant no harm. It won't happen again." Harry laboriously got up and moved towards the door, limping a bit as he went, his recent ordeals and the weight of the world taking their toll. He paused at the door. Ruth was silent. He waited another second, said "Right, then," opened the door and walked out of her life. Ruth began sobbing once more, her heart shattered, her sanity in question and she knew without a doubt that it was all her fault.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Solitude had become his way of life…not that it was really anything new, but you could ask anyone who had known him before, anyone, and they had noticed the change in Harry. The wry smile never made an appearance. The sarcastic rejoinder went unsaid. Harry was simply less…Harry. He was still all that the service needed him to be, but was somehow the lesser for it. In the months following Ruth's single day back on the Grid, Harry had begun to quietly make changes. Inquiries into Ruth's status at 5 by anyone, Ros and Lucas included, were met with looks of such darkness that the asker never dared ask again. The only person who had persisted was Malcolm, who had met with Harry just the one time after Jo, after Ruth, after his world had begun to untether from it's moorings. "Uh, Malcolm…well, I've not spoken to her since the day of Jo's funeral when she resigned from the service." Of course what he neglected to say was that he had quietly made inquiries and knew that Ruth had vacated the MI-5 safe house and promptly left the country. She had headed to Spain this time, drawn again to the healing waters of the Mediterranean, and was quietly living a simple and elegant existence working in a bookshop. Yesterday she went to the market. He hoped she had enjoyed the bottle of wine she had chosen. So perhaps his life wasn't as solitary as it seemed. He had Scarlet, he had the cats and he had Ruth, albeit from a safe distance. It was Harry's turn to ponder loss and locking his heart away somewhere for safekeeping. Ruth's accusations echoed daily in his head, and although he KNEW that he was doing his job and KNEW that he did it well, he also knew that his days in the service were numbered. His heart was no longer in it; because his heart had been taken by a certain woman who had fled to the warmth and solitude of Spain. He couldn't blame her for her anger. He wouldn't blame her for leaving. He would live each day that he had left with regret for the way it had been left between them, but he would respect her wishes and leave her alone. She had had enough loss at his hands for anyone's lifetime. Harry realized that in the waning years of his life he was to be alone, and that was as it should be. Over the past weeks he had been making arrangements; tying up loose ends and working behind the scenes to find the right person to become the new Harry Pearce. It would be hard for him to leave the Grid. He fully expected to be bereft with the loss. But he knew it was time and knew he needed to leave if he had any intention of saving his soul. He had done what he could for his country and now he had to do something for himself. He didn't like what he'd become lately. He didn't mind being cranky but hated feeling like life had passed him by. Speaking to Malcolm had helped. Malcolm, as always had understood. There was life after service and he was anxious to begin, anxious to see whom Harry Pearce would become when he was hollowed out and allowed to reinvent himself. Would he go the way of Clive? He couldn't see it as he was never much for writing anyway. He thought more and more of the trip he had talked of with Ruth, his Grand Tour, and realized that maybe he was wrong: maybe it was a trip to do alone so one could find out who the hell one was. Harry sighed but for the first time in months, felt a stirring of excitement. This was his last week. Today, he would tell the team and tomorrow he would name his replacement. Within two days after that, he will have cleared the last of his belongings from his office and walked through the pods for the last time. His team would be stunned…but maybe not surprised. Ros and Lucas would understand. They knew, without having been told that it was coming. The only difficult thing would be leaving behind the connection to Ruth. But he was a spy, no? He could find out information if he needed to. It would be nice to return to the days when he had to get by on just his wits. He just hoped he had some left by the time he needed them.


	4. Chapter 4

It was the sun that did it. The sun and the smell of salt in the air had finally healed Ruth. She thought often of those she had lost, especially Jo and Danny and Zaf, feeling at first a crippling guilt, as if they were younger siblings that she had failed to protect. As time passed, Ruth had made peace with the lives that they had chosen and gave them leave to stop haunting her. They weren't children, they were people who cared terribly for their fellow man and it had eventually cost them their lives. Finally, Ruth was able to see that their sacrifice, while personally devastating, was a hallmark of the very qualities that she had been drawn to in them in the first place. They, and many others like them, were quite simply doing what they believed to be their calling. Ruth's guilt these days came when she occasionally thought of the calling that she was avoiding. But she didn't linger with those thoughts too long. Ruth was, if not happy, then content. And really, given some of her actions, she felt she was lucky to have that. Ruth always prided herself on her brain, something that she used to nimbly leap from one exciting idea to the next. It was her ever-curious brain that allowed her to take the same pleasure in finding that perfect rare first edition for someone as she had found in sniffing out people intent on harming innocents. But her heart was another matter. Harry. The thought that she was the one this time to cause him pain was more than she could bear. That final conversation with him would run through her head at the oddest times…when she was walking along the cliffs beside the sea, when she triumphantly tracked down that book that no one else had been able to find, when she had a cup of sweet tea. The regret she felt at taking her anger out on Harry was immense, but worse, she kept seeing the look of fear in his eyes when he realized that he had lost her. She hated that it wasn't the thoughts of Harry's kindness that lingered and knew that she had to seek forgiveness to feel at peace with how she had behaved towards the one person who had never treated her with anything other than the utmost of dignity and respect. She didn't want to subject Harry to her presence to make herself feel better though. He must absolutely despise her for her weakness, for her anger, for her feeble minded attempts at ending her pain by inflicting it on someone else. Perhaps, though, she could do something FOR Harry, which even if he didn't know about it, would serve as a ceremony of sorts and let her put all of that behind her once and for all. Harry had once spoken of a Grand Tour and at the time it sounded so silly, so Victorian almost, but she had loved how it felt to indulge in the fantasy that it could be she that accompanied him. She told herself that days of accompanying anyone, anywhere were well behind her. Ruth's well-honed sense of self-preservation would not let herself ponder too long how much she would have liked to accompany the man that she loved, wherever he would have liked to go. Ruth had long ago accepted that she would finish out the rest of her life alone. It was too hard to have others who relied on you and whom you relied on and it was especially hard to settle for someone less than the love of your life. So perhaps this WAS a tour to be done on one's own. She could pay homage to all that was good about Harry and put those demons to rest, while at the same time putting herself on a new path to…who knows where? As someone alone she could find a home wherever she pleased. It was at the same time an exhilarating and a frightening idea, but one that would have to be put on the back burner at the moment. Right now, she had arrangements to make…and for the first time in a long time, she felt a stirring of excitement. Life kept moving forward and it was time that she began moving forward with it.


	5. Chapter 5

Harry glanced around him at the town square and thought, rather petulantly, that this looked just like the square he had visited an hour ago. He wasn't sure what was wrong today, he just knew that he was in a foul mood. Nothing was pleasing him. He felt at loose ends all of the sudden, awkward at being by himself and feeling like everything he did was wrong. He had awakened at his normal ungodly hour, dressed and then realized he had nothing to do. Sitting in the lobby reading the paper for 3 hours, he had noticed the curious stares of the bellhop. When he finally ventured out into the world, he had stepped on the toe of a young toddler and the lad had howled and screamed as his mother glared at Harry. In the square, the pigeons had dive bombed him and now he had white spots on his overcoat. A group of chattering old ladies going to the market had seen it and pointed and laughed uproariously. Harry didn't know what irritated him more, the fact that they were laughing at him or the fact that he couldn't imagine laughing again. Leaving the service had indeed been hard and he was beginning to doubt he had made the right decision. It wasn't as if he was old: he was relatively young! What the hell was he going to do for the rest of his life? Travel from identical town square to town square in Europe? The quaintness would kill him. He had tried to read a John Le Carre novel but that was a huge mistake. He kept criticizing all of the details and when he had yelled out "That's bloody ridiculous!" in a quiet café in Paris and been asked to leave he had left the book on the table. It was still too fresh, too raw for it to be interesting or ironic or anything other than a spotlight on exactly what he was missing. Traveling alone through Europe was an idea that was beginning to be one of his more idiotic ones. He hadn't had a decent sweet tea in days and he had seen more castles and squares than a normal man was meant to see. If he was honest with himself, Harry knew this trip was good for him but he couldn't shake this mood. He couldn't shake thoughts of Ruth and how this trip would have been different if she had been with him. He wondered if he would have left had she remained on the Grid. Probably not. Seeing her everyday was the greatest motivation he had ever had to go to work. But she wasn't there, hadn't been there for far too long and it had all gone sour for him. He knew that he would never get to the point where he didn't need Ruth. He thought about the times he could have told her, about the times he had tried and been stopped. Ruth's anger was understandable, and he was sure that it had, over time obliterated any feelings she may have had for him. Unfortunately, this didn't stop Harry from seeing her everywhere. Snippets of conversations with her often came unbidden to his mind. He saw her blue eyes wherever he looked…in cloudless skies, in a feather sticking out of an old ladies hat, in a piece of fabric draped across a window. Oh good god. Sometimes Harry's disgust at his own melodrama was intense. Really? He saw her eyes in a feather? Now that WAS ridiculous. He was becoming entirely too moony, like a spotty 16 year old boy, but he didn't know how to stop it. This Grand Tour was Ruth's and he was just along for the ride. But without his companion's gentle humor and brilliance, it was turning out to be less than grand, indeed. Harry sighed. Perhaps today he should just retreat to his hotel with an obscenely expensive bottle of scotch and be done with it. Tomorrow…yes, tomorrow he'd feel a bit closer to whatever passed for normal in his world these days. He felt someone approaching behind him and he forced himself to relax. He wasn't a spook anymore and it was likely just his waiter, bringing his asked for cheque. Harry pivoted in his chair and his breathing stopped. He blinked. "Hello Harry." Ruth stood waiting for him to move, to breathe, to acknowledge her in some way. She had seen him as he entered the square and knew that she had to speak to him - knew that something had drawn them to this spot at the same time. Maybe they were both seeking the same thing? The silence lengthened and what little confidence Ruth had began to waver. She had known that Harry wouldn't be thrilled to see her, but she had counted on his innate politeness to mask those feelings. She could only stand here for a few more seconds under that withering gaze…it was too much, no matter how much she deserved it. Ruth took in a great breath "Well, Harry, good to see you. Goodbye." The last word was a whisper, as Ruth's chin had begun to quiver and she wasn't certain that she could beat a retreat fast enough. As she spun round, she heard that growl that she had missed so much, "Ruth! For godsakes, are you real? Is that really you?" Tears streamed down her cheeks and she let out the breath she didn't even know that she had been holding. This is what a Grand Tour was all about, allowing yourself to be surprised, to be changed by what you encountered. Ruth was finally ready. She was sure that she had been seeking out the change without even knowing it. Harry would always be the still point to her turning world and there was no sense in fighting it any longer. "Yes Harry. I'm real. It's really me."


End file.
